Sir Stafford Cripps

Sir Stafford Cripps was a British barrister and Labour politician who led the 1942 Cripps Mission to India and was one of the three ministers of the 1946 Cabinet Mission. For Punjab and the Sikhs his name is tied to two plans that offered India self-government and left Punjab's future open. The Shiromani Akali Dal rejected the first, and rejected the second at first before accepting it at Congress's request.

He was born on 24 April 1889 in Chelsea, London, studied chemistry at University College London, then turned to law and became a King's Counsel in 1927. He was Labour MP for Bristol East from 1931 to 1950, ambassador to the Soviet Union from 1940 to 1942, Lord Privy Seal in 1942 and President of the Board of Trade from 1945 to 1947. He was Chancellor of the Exchequer from 13 November 1947 to 19 October 1950, when ill health forced him out. He died in Zurich on 21 April 1952.

Key moments

• March 1942: he reached Delhi on 22 March with a War Cabinet offer of dominion status after the war, a constituent assembly, and the freedom for any province to stay out of the Indian Union. Congress and the League rejected it. The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism lists it among the plans the Shiromani Akali Dal rejected, and Wikipedia cites scholars saying the Sikhs rejected it because the opt-out clause could lead to partition.
• 16 May 1946: with Lord Pethick-Lawrence and A. V. Alexander he put out the Cabinet Mission's statement. It rejected a sovereign Pakistan and warned that dividing the Punjab would divide the Sikhs. It proposed a union in three sections, with Punjab, the North-West Frontier and Sind in Section B. For electoral purposes the Sikhs were counted as a community of their own, but with only 4 of the 28 Punjab seats and 4 of the 35 in Section B, with a representative of Baluchistan added.
• June 1946: Master Tara Singh told a meeting at Amritsar to prepare to die in the struggle ahead. At Congress's request the Akali Dal then accepted the proposals, the Encyclopaedia says.
• 18 July 1946: Cripps told the House of Commons that the Sikhs wanted treatment like that given the Muslims, but are a much smaller community and not a majority in any area. Counted on population, he said, they "lose their weightage". It had asked the two main parties to consider giving them "a strong voice in the affairs of the Punjab".

What he is remembered for: two missions that did not produce a settlement. In 1942 the scholar Shyam Ratna Gupta argues that the Viceroy and the Secretary of State privately worked against it. In 1946, as Cripps told the Commons, the Mission could not get the two main parties to agree an interim government. Master Tara Singh's position before the Mission, in the Encyclopaedia's account, was to oppose partition because it would split the Sikhs and, if it came anyway, to ask for an independent Sikh state.